LEGO® Kidsfest

LEGO® Kidsfest is a yearly tour, and usually only offered in a few select markets around the country. In 2014, Dallas was one of 7 locations, and we had a chance to visit and spend an entire day PLAYING with Lego Bricks! Our entire family had an amazing time!

If you are planning to attend the 2015 LEGO® Kidsfest, check out my Mommy Tips for making the most of your visit!

Check the schedule to plan your day around the events. Set an alarm on your phone for the scheduled things you want to do (best to try and do this at home). We missed one of the demonstrations we had planned to go to simply because we were carried away building and didn’t check the time!

Bags are checked, and food and drinks are not allowed. They do offer concession stand type food.

2. Huge Model Creations!

The HUGE LEGO® models are amazing! Darth Vader and other Star Wars characters, Batman, The Hulk and many, many more!

The event is so large, we did a reconnaissance of everything before we jumped in and started building at one of the exhibits!

3. Lego Master Builders

Lego Master Builders offer insights into how the Lego sets are created, and take questions from the crowd on all things Lego!

We only THOUGHT we had a lot of Legos at home! This huge pile is open for building, scooping and even getting buried under! It’s every kids dream!

5. Brick Battle Zone

Contestants race against each other in time and creativity challenges! The wait to be a contestant was a time-eater, but totally worth it!

6. The Lego Art Gallery

Participants design a Lego tile with college names, characters, their initials and when you are 13, your favorite band, 5 Seconds of Summer.

7. Race Ramps

The Race Ramps are my sons and husband’s favorite! They probably spent 40% of their time building and racing cars. It’s an obsession.

8. Star Wars Holocron Vault

Because there are so many different Lego set exhibits, Star Wars, Chima, Ninjago, you can’t possibly build in all of them. We had a game plan before we arrived on the ones they wanted to visit first, but explained to the kids, especially my youngest, that we would also go with the ones that were least crowded, and come back to the ones they most wanted! Talking about it ahead of time helped with the transition.

9. Lego Friends and Disney Princess Building Center

I’m not sure if Lego is practicing gender stereo-typing, but there were as many girls as boys at Kidsfest, and they were playing with EVERYTHING!

The Disney Princess Lego models were AMAZING!

10. Lego Mindstorms

The Lego Mindstorms are robots that they can build and program, and this is the perfect place to let the kids play and see if they have an interest. If they do, be sure and check out the First Lego League, which “teaches real-world problem solving through engineering design and teamwork”.

I was really surprised at the affordable prices in the retail store, and even purchased a few gifts while we were there. The marketplace offers some of the newest Lego products that you can’t find anywhere else! I would have loved to have been able to purchase items without my kids seeing it!

They accept credit cards!

12. Bring the Little Ones

There are plenty of Duplo Building Blocks for smaller hands, and I love the large Lego blocks they have for building!

13. Fun Lego Facts:

More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949.

The LEGO minifigure represents the world’s largest population of people! More than four billion minifigures have been produced in the last 30 years. This is almost 12 times the population of the United States!

LEGO minifigures are out of this world, literally. The two Mars Rovers have an image of the LEGO minifigure etched into their front grill.

Approximately seven LEGO sets are sold each second.

There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world’s six billion inhabitants.

Laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks sold in a year would reach more than five times around the world.

There are 915 million ways to combine six eight-stud LEGO bricks.

Children around the world spend five billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks.

With a production of about 306 million tires produced a year, the LEGO group is the largest producer of tires in the world.

LEGO is the contraction of two Danish words, “leg godt” which means “play well”.

There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world’s six billion inhabitants.

19 billion LEGO elements are produced every year. 2.16 million LEGO elements are molded every hour, or 36,000 per minute.